Roasted Fennel Medallions, Sweet Red Pepper Strips and Carrot Slices, A Cool First Course

I was back in the mountains recently and cooked supper for half a dozen friends, using the electric stove that I’d used a few weeks before. The oven ran REALLY hot, and the fruit galette I made the first time cooked in 15 minutes instead of 40. So this time I made sure to test the temperature, set the dial to where it would be 400 degrees when I baked the mushroom galette I was preparing...and preparing...and preparing...five sorts of fresh mushrooms, dried wild mushrooms, onions and shallots, rich sauce, plus the pastry, damn glorious thing took me hours. The oven temp turned out to be fine. What wasn’t was that, in my rush to get it into the oven, I forgot to brush the surface with beaten egg, so that, when I opened the oven door, instead of burnished, the galette looked ghostly. That was the first thing I noticed. The second—How on earth?!*#@%! oh no! was that fully a fourth of the galette was sliding/had slud off the buttered rimless baking sheet and precious chunks of mushrooms and shards of pastry lay on the oven floor. Nightmare. Then I saw that, in my haste, I’d set the oven rack on two different levels! one higher than the other… I felt like an idiot.
What did work beautifully in my supper, though, and made me feel redeemed a bit, was the first course. I had come to the mountain expecting to cook for four friends, but then wanted two more to join us. I planned to serve hors d’ouvres of slices of raw fennel, Moroccan black olives, Genoese salami, and pistachios, was going to serve pattypan squashes with the galette. But I didn’t have enough squash. So I decided to roast the fennel and…what else? At the market I’d grabbed a couple of lovely sweet red peppers and a bunch of long skinny carrots. Because the cabin’s dinner plates were smallish--everything would be too crowded--I decided I’d serve the vegetables as a cool first course.
I brushed two baking sheets with olive oil, set the oven to 400 degrees. I trimmed off the fennel stalks at the top of the bulb (reserved the stalks for leaves), and sliced the bulb top to bottom a little more than ¼-inch thick, taking care to keep the pieces intact. I arranged the pieces (there were 8) on a baking sheet and brushed them lightly with oil. I cored the two sweet peppers, cut them into strips about 3/8-inch wide, then cut the strips in half (a more manageable size). Put the strips in a bowl, drizzled them with olive oil, and tossed with my hands so every piece was moistened, then spread the strips on the remainder of the fennel sheet. I roasted these vegetables until the fennel was tender crisp and had taken on color but before the peppers got limp, not very long. Meantime I peeled the 8 carrots and cut them on the diagonal in pieces about ½-inch wide. Tossed them with olive oil as I had the peppers and arranged them on the second baking sheet. Roasted them until they were also tender crisp—but they didn’t look roasted, so I put them under the broiler and shook the sheet until the slices had hints of brown.
Now I sprinkled the warm vegetables with lemon juice—one lemon was enough—a bit of coarse salt and a few turns of the white pepper mill. Tossed very gently to blend, covered with waxed paper, set aside. I snipped feathery leaves from the fennel stalks—minding not to catch even the tiniest bits of stems (it should look like dill from the Dill Weed jar), about ¼ cupful.
At serving time, I re-tossed the strips and slices to glisten again. I set a medallion of fennel on each salad plate, arranged carrot slices at the base, then divided up the sweet red peppers, half a portion on each side of the fennel. Sprinkled with fennel snips and served. This much would make 8 servings, but I distributed it to 7.
I will make this combination again…it could not be simpler, the colors are gorgeous, and, to my delight, everyone exclaimed how delicious it was.
Still I wonder who it was that first observed, "Haste makes waste..."